


Discourteous

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-28
Updated: 2007-08-28
Packaged: 2019-01-19 06:43:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12405108
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: After a war, the living are superfluous.





	Discourteous

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

If you’d done this right, you think, you’d be dead by now.

It’s terribly rude to be alive after a war. To watch ally and foe alike take blows, and blows, and fall, and yet when the dust clears to be standing. It’s disrespectful. When greater wizards, powerful witches, friends and mentors lie, cradled on the floor by death, the breath in your lungs is pointed.

If you’d done this properly, you’d be cold in the ground, surrounded by your friends and family. You’d have a plot in Godric’s Hollow. You’d have a funeral. You’d have, for the first time, a home. You’d fit.

You’d have had a funeral, perhaps a cremation. A bonfire, an explosion,, every emotion burning, scorching; burning, burning, _dying._

As it is, you’ve been to too many funerals: eaten too many stale snacks and sipped too many flat Butterbeers. You’ve observed too many regretful, respectful silences, and heard too many eulogies and stifled too many bored yawns that always, always lead to those inevitable tears. Funerals may be for the living, not for the dead, but they’re terrible thought out. You don’t need silence, you don’t need tears secreted and blinked away. You need _noise,_ you need screams and tears and maybe music, maybe you need whispers in your ear, maybe you need pain, maybe you need to weep and feel, you just _don’t know._ You need to fall.

That’s the word you keep hearing. _Fallen,_ they are the _fallen._ And everyone pays them attention, cossets and cares for them. But you, they ignore. Everyone knows how to deal with the dead, but the living is a different story. The living are awkward, in some sort of limbo. 

_Yes,_ you think, _that’s it._ The living have already breathed long enough. They’ve survived a war, and that’s enough for any person. Every year they live now is greedy, is taking more than their fair share. Each breath now is filling time, until the inevitable conclusion of that war catches up with them.

Now it’s like your hyposensitized: every sound, every smell, every moving sight and gentle word is one that they aren’t privileged to see. Every time you feel Ginny’s hand on your skin, it’s Tonks’ hand that’ll never again be on Remus’ skin. When you see Ron and Hermione murmuring conspiratorially, it’s Bellatrix Lestrange muttering to Tom Riddle. The mad, the bad, the kind, the cruel: they all did it better than you did, because they all saw fit to accept nature and die in a war.

You see George, left behind, and know that he’s done it even worse than you have. None of you have done this right. None of you have done this properly. You were the Boy who Lived, but you’d outstayed your welcome. You missed your cue, because you were too young, and too naïve to realise that in war the dead are the lucky ones.

The living exist. The dead don’t even have to attempt that.

If you’d done this properly, if you had but known, you’d have been another name on the fatalities list, and a burning pyre to the Boy who Died.

And if you die now, it’s too late. Because this is a ridiculously unsociable time to die. Everyone’s almost finished mourning. You’ll have to wait a few years before you can fit death into your schedule.

Pity, that. 


End file.
